Summer's Almost GONE
Only been three months this time. Not bad, not bad!
I'm down to four months left in 2007, now, but so far things seem like they're actually going okay. It's been an excellent summer. Mom visited in July: had lots of fun, visited wineries, new Akron Art Museum, etc.
August was a really busy month. I split the difference with my homey out in Boston, and we ended up in New York's Finger Lakes. Great scenery, even more wineries, and various surprises (great beer for a wine region, Corning's 11.5-hole disc golf course, Mark Twain's grave in Elmira, etc.) abounded. Then last weekend I was back in the fatherland on a business/etc. trip. Finally got to set foot inside Morrill Hall. Visited one more winery just for consistency's sake. Oh, got to play Nintendo Wii, also, very cool.
Business has not been too bad so far. It's still in an early phase, definitely, but about four months after deciding to go "off the grid" I have not had occasion to really regret the decision yet.
Things fall apart: the Toyota Camry's reliability may deserve its reputation, but there's always an exception... Forked over a chunk of change to replace the dumb charcoal canister, and have viewed subsequent flakey behavoir with a scowl...
Alas, most of summer has gone by with my running shoes sitting empty. With a poorly-aligned knee, one leg shorter than the other, sub-optimal arches, and my physical therapist using the word "arthritis" as of last week... it's unfortunately likely that any running I get to do is on borrowed time. But, hey, it was good while it lasted, and maybe I can yet patch things up for a few more years. Better Living Through Chemistry, that's my motto.
13 (September 2, 2007 at 11:14 p.m. EDT)
Summer's Almost Here
Crazy, huh? Where did those past five months go?
Well, I was pretty busy working for Cleveland Botanical Garden, for one thing. Eight and a half hour days (at minimum) plus 90 minutes of commuting, plus freelancing most evenings and weekends, really made the weeks fly past.
It seemed like one week I was making my way back and forth through treacherous blizzards, and the next week flowers were everywhere and it was 70 degrees outside. (Actually I think that really happened, come to think of it.)
What else? Well, I traded my Pontiac Grand Prix and its mysterious, unpredictable reliability problems for a 2000 Toyota Camry. The car buying process wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared, though I think I caught a decent break. As with many things these days, it's hard to imagine getting by without the internet.
I decided to give full-time self-employment a try, also. So far it's great. If I just find some more paying clients, I'll be sound as a pound. (Which, these days, is pretty sound, mate.) Remember the name: Modern Alchemy LLC. I don't have a formal referrals incentive program, yet, but rest assured that everyone who sends new business this way will be rewarded somehow or other.
A couple of weeks ago I took the aforementioned Camry on a road trip down I-71 to see a bit more of the Buckeye State. Good times. Photos from Columbus, Cincinnati and Bardstown, Kentucky are online as of yesterday.
This past Saturday I went back to the Botanical Garden for the 2007 Flower Show. I ended up spending about five and a half hours wandering among the gardens and exhibits. Congratulations to the garden staff, volunteers, landscapers, et al. Photos from the flower show will go online soonish.
12 (May 29, 2007 at 11:44 a.m. EDT)
What I Learned: 2006
The sun has gone down on 2006. Of course, at this time of year, at sunset we still have a number of hours to go before the year officially ends. But in any event, it's dark out and tomorrow's a holiday. Time to pour a drink and reflect on the year a bit before whatever evening activities beckon.
I dabbled in predictions last year and the results, it's now safe to say, were hardly spectacular. Though perhaps not quite as far-fetched as were my grand plans for 2006.
I'm making big plans again, anyway, but I'm going to pass on predicting the future this time out. Instead, I present an appropriately more-humble look at some things which I learned during the past twelve months.
- I learned what Ohio's "Usage Tax" is. It being, essentially, a cynical joke of little benefit to anyone.
- I learned that, at least in this society, there's not really any right to privacy in the workplace. They can't spy on you in the bathroom, or anything quite so brazen, but anything you bring into the office or, watch out, do with the company's computer, is fair game for paranoid bosses to investigate as they see fit. FYI.
- I learned that the French expression "en train de" means, more or less, "in the middle of." As in "Allie is in the middle of watching Sesame Street."
- I learned a new appreciation for both bourbon whiskey and tea. My interest in bourbon resulted from a desire to try locally-made goods (bourbon country being just across the Ohio river in Kentucky), while my interest in tea was probably sparked by a former coworker and then fanned by the opportunity presented by numerous ad agencies which employed me ("coffee stations" with a selection of teas being a common feature of large ad agencies, I'm finding). I would like to single out Evan Williams bourbon and Earl Grey tea as favorites.
- I found out what it's like to go through a car wash. An automatic car wash, at any rate. Having never felt the need to wash any car that I own (and, as an apartment dweller, lacking the outdoor faucet and garden hose with which to wash my car at home), I admit that I chose an automatic car wash largely so that I wouldn't have to deal with any other people who might wonder what planet I had come from that I could be so clueless. (Baby steps, right?)
- I learned that money is basically the most important thing in modern life, being a solution to all but a couple of life's problems.
- I learned to use some new software, including Mac OS X Tiger and Adobe Creative Suite 2. Hint: Illustrator's pathfinder palette buttons now create a sort of intermediate, "preview" state; the "expand" button completes the process. (This probably was not technically new in CS2. I know. But it didn't work that way in Illustrator 8, which was what I had previously used at home and which was a damn fine piece of software, even in the Mac "Classic" environment.)
- I discovered all kinds of things about the variety of keyboards used for non-Roman characters. The multiple approaches used by the Chinese and Japanese, in particular, seem both confoundingly-complex and absolutely ingenius.
- I learned that dodgy "claim-jumping," as a business strategy, is still as viable as during the most irrational excesses of the dotcom era, if not moreso.
- I learned that, as brain-damaged as this country's chief executive seems, things aren't all that much better in the number two slot. Or, to put it another way, guns don't put old men in the hospital, but Vice President Cheney does, especially when he's a few over the legal limit (and I don't mean hunting regulations).